Road blocks can be tricky things - not least for journalists. Grenades brandished at car windows on narrow roads. Bored kids with big guns looking to make a point.

Sometimes a piece of official paper will get you through. Or cigarettes. Or lots of smiles. But often - and without wanting to sound too melodramatic - the difference between safe passage and something much nastier can boil down to a word, a name.

Saying "BBC" has helped me plenty of times - certainly more times than it's hindered. I've shouted it out in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Somalia.

In 2011 we were waved down by sullen armed men on a country road in Ivory Coast. I could see four, maybe five people tied up in the bushes nearby, staring at us in silent desperation. "Are you French?" the commander asked, menacingly. "We don't like the French."

A few days later, further south, I had to beg for the life of our local fixer. He was Muslim. The soldiers made him kneel by a ditch, a barrel jabbing the back of his neck.

Doctor Mosoka Fallah - a stout, gruff, profoundly earnest man - stood outside a small house on the outskirts of Monrovia in Liberia wondering if this is where it would all end.

"This is the last stretch, the last mile. There's a lot of pressure on us. If they all go for 21 days without symptoms then that could be the end of Ebola," said the 44-year-old Harvard-trained doctor, watching his colleagues take the temperatures of a dozen women and children gathered on the porch.

The Malekutu Cricket Academy has had constant problems attracting funding

It takes a certain stubborn devotion to play cricket in Malekutu, an isolated rural village in the hills not far from South Africa's border with Mozambique.

There is no pitch, just a stretch of tattered carpet in the middle of an overgrown football field; tin cans balanced on a cinder block take the place of a wicket, and the locals are hardly enthusiastic.

Julius Malema slipped quietly into the room, looking cheerful, perhaps a little slimmer than on our last encounter, and quite the opposite of the rabble-rousing, Mugabe-in-the-making demagogue that his enemies and critics in South Africa and abroad still like to portray.

"Marriage," he said by way of an explanation, and fell onto a sofa with a happy sigh. He recently married a woman from his neighbourhood in Limpopo.

A wedding at a glitzy resort hotel has caused a headache for South Africa's leader

It is two years since an unusual plane landed at a South African military air force base in Pretoria. The aircraft was a private jet carrying guests from India, heading to a high society wedding at Sun City - the famous casino resort in the hills to the north-west of the capital.

About Andrew

Andrew has been Africa correspondent since 2009, covering the continent's highs and lows - from the World Cup, Africa's economic boom, and the literary treasures of Timbuktu, to the pirates of Somalia, the conflict in Ivory Coast, and the struggles of Zimbabwe.

He has spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent, based in the former Soviet Union, Africa, and Asia, and reported on the 1993 parliamentary rebellion in Moscow, two Chechen wars, the Asian tsunami in 2004, and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Congo, Sudan, Liberia and beyond.

Andrew was born in the UK, grew up in Belgium and at boarding school. He is married with three children.